Are you the best Bullet or Blitz chess player in your country? Are you a 960 champion? Or are you simply the best on ChessCube? The CCCC & CCIC tournaments will answer all of these questions!

The ChessCube Country Championship (CCCC) This is a first for ChessCube - country-based tournaments! The CCCC will take place on ChessCube throughout Sunday August 21, 2011. The event takes place the entire day, scheduled at 4PM-8PM local time per registered country.

*For countries with multiple time-zones, local time is your Eastern most time-zone, e.g. USA East Coast. This can get complicated with some countries, so we will publish the actual GMT for all tournaments when we have the countries that qualify for a tournament!

Players can enter just 1 event, or all. There is a restriction to allow only VIP players to enter these tournaments. We want this to be for VIP and Crown buyers - as we would like to give our paying customers value for their investment in ChessCube.

* If there are only few interested players for one country (8 or 9), then we will host a Round Robin tournament for that country ** We will change the number of rounds based on entries to make sure as many eligible players as possible can enter.

We naturally cannot create these tournaments for -all- countries on ChessCube. To determine the interest from each country, we have created an online "Pre-Entry Interest Form" - found here: http://bit.ly/ccccentry

Please complete this form (and get users from your country to complete it too if they are interested in playing) by no later than Sunday August 14, 2011 at 23:59PM GMT. If your country does not have at least 8 interested VIPs who want to enter, we cannot host a tournament for your country (if you like the idea but have under 8 VIPs, you can always run one manually - should be trivial to do with that few people!)

Tiebreak and the Country Champion Title:Fairplay tiebreak will determine final positions in the tournament for crowns, but we don't want it to decide the Champions. For the first position ONLY, if two players end on the same game score, the title will NOT be based on the Fairplay tiebreak value - so ignore what the tournament says if it designates a winner even though two players end on the same score! Instead, tiebreak will rather work in this order:

1. Direct encounter (if they played each other in the tournament): the winner of that match is the champion OR2.a. Two extra games are played (one black and one white) between the players for the relevant time control. If neither player is ahead after this, this process repeats itself (2 games) until one player is ahead. These games are played immediately after the tournament has ended - so make sure you hang around long enough to see if there was a tie for first place.2. b. If MORE than two players ended up tied, each plays the two games, as above, against each of the other tied players in a round robin format, until 1 player is ahead after a full round of games.

NOTE: Because the country tournaments are held throughout the day, an organizer or moderator may not be around to manage a tiebreak playoff and we expect the players to look at the tournament results and determine if this is needed - so if there is any complication or difficulty around this playoff (e.g. a player refuses to play, does not have time to play, or a technical problem arises), the organizers may coordinate with the tied players to arrange a playoff at a different time and date. Please make sure you contact us at [email protected] if playoff problems occur.

What do I win in the CCCC? Here's the fun bit Firstly, the winners of each country tournament get the title of Country Champion for that time control and chess variant. As Country Champion you will be awarded a 1 month VIP prize.

But that is not all! The top two finishers will each receive a ticket into the CCIC tournament - the tournament of champions! - which will bring together winners from ALL CCCC country tournament winners!

Special provision for CCIC ticket and crown awards:ChessCube Fairplay has tiebreak rules and scoring, and we will generally stick with those. However, should the case arrive where a player ends up on the same score and tiebreak value and is placed below a top 3 finisher because of Fairplay's position assignment (Fairplay still has some kinks to be worked through!) , or some other unforeseen or bug related incident takes place it is at the TD's (ChessCube administrators) discretion to allow the user to play on in the CCIC or to award the user crowns. Such instances will be handled on a case by case basis.

The ChessCube Individual Championship (CCIC)The ChessCube Individual Championship (CCIC) will be held on Saturday August 27, 2011, 1 week after the CCCC. Non VIP users or non-ticket holders for the CCIC will be able to enter the event at 200 Crowns entry fee - we know this is a steep entry fee, but we want to allow users who missed the CCCC or placed below second place to still enter if they are interested.

We cannot possibly choose a time that will suit everyone so we have chosen Saturday in case some players are (unfortunately) required to play at very late or early hours (they can sleep in later that day!)

The ChessCube Individual Championship (CCIC) Special Entry Draw:We want to allow 3 other lucky ChessCubers to play against the best on ChessCube in the CCIC final. For this reason we will randomly select three players - VIP or non-VIP - who have helped ChessCube by referring valid new users to our site. Please follow the referral instructions as documented here: http://bit.ly/ccrefer - the more valid referrals you have, the GREATER chance you have of getting picked since each valid referral is one entry into this special draw. So start inviting your friends to ChessCube if you want to increase your chance of playing with the best! The winners will be processed, announced and notified on Thursday August 25, 2011 at 6 PM GMT - so you have until then to invite as many users as you can.

Note on cheating:All games will be analyzed and a determination will be made whether cheating was involved. Should a player be found to have cheated, that user will be banned and will not be eligible for any prizes. Unfortunately we cannot correct all the damage that may have been done by the cheaters, especially during the tournament in real-time, but will make a best-effort attempt to fix what we can. In obvious cases, for instance, you are clear second AND the first placed player gets banned AND the third place player did not lose to the cheater, the decision will be simple (we will award you first place). For less obvious cases, the course of action will be unclear and will be handled on a case by case basis. As a DEFAULT: the standings as presented at the end of the tournament are the OFFICIAL standings, regardless of cheating and the organizers will only manually intervene to change these standings when they deem it possible, necessary and beneficial to do so. Cheating is sadly a reality in online chess so hopefully you can appreciate and understand the complications involved with either catching cheaters or fixing the mess they cause

CCCC & CCIC Disclaimer:We are all aware that these tournaments are taking place on the Internet and all sorts of unfortunate events may affect results. These events may have to do with ChessCube's servers, playing client or code, or the user's computer or browser, or just the Internet in general (including lag, line or ISP faults). For this reason, while we want to ensure fair results and will strive to achieve this, ChessCube and the organizers will not be held responsible for any adverse event and will not be required to change results or otherwise compensate users. Moreover, to ensure the smooth running of the tournaments, the tournament rules may be changed at any time (and this page edited accordingly) and ALL decisions made by the tournament organizers will be final, and no correspondence will be entered into. Your participation in the CCCC or CCIC is an acceptance of the rules, this disclaimer and the provisions therein.

Contacting the organizers:If you have any questions about the tournament, then please reply to this post. If you have a specific problem that needs urgent attention please email us at [email protected] - use this email address for any results disputes or cheating accusations etc.

littleriver wrote:Excellent idea. All the best to all participants. However, the title winners should be called as "CC Invididual Champion among VIP users" and so on. THANKS.

Why? It is standard for almost any tournament to have all competitors registered/subscribed to the relevant officiating body. Hence you have the FIDE World Chess Champion or the FIFA World Cup champion, and all participants must be FIDE or FIFA registered. They don't just let anyone random show up and play for the prize....

So having users subscribed to ChessCube is a perfectly legitimate way of running this, and the prize winners will legitimately be the respective ChessCube Champions!